A decade of progress in carbon cycle science from NASA’s Orbiting Carbon Observatory (OCO-2 and OCO-3) missions

As pathfinder missions, NASA’s Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2 (OCO-2) and its sister mission Orbiting Carbon Observatory-3 (OCO-3) have significantly expanded global CO₂ observation coverage, providing high-quality atmospheric CO₂ data at unprecedented spatial and temporal resolutions. Additionally, both missions retrieve solar-induced chlorophyll fluorescence (SIF), an indicator of photosynthetic activity. The OCO-2/3 team have achieved the extraordinary accuracy and precision requirement of delivering single-column CO₂ retrievals with errors less than 1.0 ppm (less than 0.25%), making this data the "gold-standard" of remotely sensed atmospheric CO₂. Both missions are now operating well beyond their designed lifetimes, showcasing technological excellence and demonstrating the value of space-based atmospheric CO₂ measurements for improving our understanding of the carbon cycle at a variety of spatiotemporal scales, ie., from global carbon budgets to monitoring regional carbon cycle response to extreme events and tracking local emissions from urban areas and power plants. Our extended operations have allowed the project and science team to continuously improve all aspects of the missions, thus enabling the scientific community to investigate long-term trends in the carbon cycle and pursue policy-level applications that would not have been possible with only two-three years of data.

In this talk, we will synthesize the major scientific achievements and breakthroughs in applications from the scientific community using the OCO-2/3 data, emphasizing how the science achievements and requirements on the data accuracy have evolved during the last decade. We will also address current challenges and limitations of the data as well as discuss new scientific and application areas that this growing data record can advance. In the end, we will briefly touch on the synergistic scientific questions that can be addressed by combining the OCO-2/3 data record with the growing constellation of CO₂ satellites, such as ESA's CO2M, JAXA's GOSAT-GW and others.